The last image is indelible. He on the porch of his house in front of Sandymount – the most Joycean of Dublin’s beaches – standing, the wind ruffling his white hair, his hand waving at me as I cycle away, my head turned towards him, the tears inside. Fragile and happy, he had just shown me where he kept «my singing stone», a Celtic basalt harp by the Sardinian sculptor Pinuccio Sciola that he had entrusted to me to deliver to my friend Seamus. It was the end of July 2013. He will die on August 30th.
Digging
On this tenth anniversary of his death, I remember him in the month of his birth: April, not the “cruelest month” for him (TS Eliot), and the 13th, the same day as another great Irish writer (Nobel Prize 1969), Samuel Beckett, and for both Good Friday. I have beautiful and dear memories of the great Irish poet Nobel 1995. Astonished, together with many, at the news of her earthly end, I registered in my head the timbre of her voice, the empathy towards us younger expatriates in Dublin, the humility of her gestures, the joy of her smile, the greatness of his spoken word. Wonderful as he read his poems. Who among us could hear him say (don’t act) Digging, one of his most important and beautiful poems, was given a priceless treasure. Which is never forgotten. Magnificent in public talks, in overcrowded classrooms where he didn’t fly a fly, while he spoke of Greek classics, of Virgil and Dante and Elizabeth Bishop, of details that make poetry, of the sublime challenge of translations. His voice, resonant and deep, as he reads the poems of the much loved WB Yeats, can be heard in the halls of the National Library of Ireland where, until 7 January 2024, an exhibition dedicated to the life and work of Yeats is on ( Nobel 1923). His voice is beautiful, and dear, when, after a very loud knock on the door of my study at Trinity College, he asked me for the literal meaning of a Dantesque word and then quickly disappeared, walking backwards towards the exit, telling me that despite did not know Italian, he knew Latin well and above all: «Remember: I am a poet!».
It is enough to read his Anglo-Irish rendering of the Ugolino episode to understand the depth of those words addressed to me. The world of translations was fundamental to him, constitutive of his poetry. Important is the recent volume released in 2022, in London at Faber&Faber, The Translations of Seamus Heaney, edited by Marco Sonzogni, which collects – for the first time – his translations from the most diverse languages, including: ancient Irish, ancient English, medieval Italian, classical Greek and Latin, modern Italian, Spanish, French, Romanian, German. Encouraging was his voice as, with his sly manner, he advised me on and how to apply for Fulbright (which I obtained and I can’t thank him enough). His laughter was amused and vibrant, with Marco Sonzogni and me, in front of a dish he was fond of, for some unfortunate translations of his poem: «I’ve beome a dessert!» since the word wood core from his Exposure had been rendered as forest fruitwhereas instead it denotes a sort of Irish guerrilla (from the Gaelic voice quadrilaterals, “kerne”). In the Italian context, his involvement is strong, as well as for Dante, for Pascoli (read his version of the Aquilone) and Luzi. And, among the poets of younger generations, his attention to Paolo Febbraro, to whom he was bound by a habit of friendship, and Antonella Anedda. She didn’t know her and she knew Heaney’s poetry but not her person. The occasion of their first meeting was in the spring of 2008, at the Poetry Festival held annually in Dún Laoghaire (Dublin), in an evening in which the great American poet Henri Cole was also invited. I had told Heaney, guest of honor for the evening, that Antonella would be present together with the English poet and his translator, James McKendrick. The hall was packed. Heaney, seated in one of the first rows, while she read – shy and antirhetorical – her poems and James rendered them in translation, turned to me with a big smile, cheeks flushed, hand closed with thumb recto. The great poet, he was rich in sym-pathia and humanity (read Human Chain). He loved the world, affection, reserve, solitude. He repeated that the Nobel had taken away his inner spaces of peace and silence. He loved to retreat to his retreat in the beautiful Wicklow Mountains, with no internet connection. Champion of resilience, ethics, beauty. He taught us to pursue what he was passionate about, he greeted us with his Keep going, Start and start again.
“Do not be afraid”
What mark did his poetry leave? Antonella Anedda replies: «Digging is for me the perfect example of a poem that sees the most usual things: a bottle of milk, potatoes, and transforms them through the rhythm of digging. The peat is like the page, the spade is the pen and replaces the rifle: Heaney’s choice towards the civil war. The pen that is “snug as a gun” is the only possible weapon». The importance of the function of poetry, on which to reflect in the terrible world of which we are all a part, to which Heaney has dedicated one of his most beautiful essays. Dying, from the Blackrock clinic that late August, he had wanted to send to his companion a life, Marie, a message: «Noli timere». Sublime gesture towards the beloved. And this his poetry teaches us about him: to live with courageous humility (he preferred the earthly Virgil of the Bucolics to the otherworldly Dante of the Comedy), on this side of any anthropocentric, false belief.